Poem fractal

Before the Squall

by Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 to 22 January 1945 (~80)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“For nearly a year I have been normal, human, like other people, no longer isolated from the men and women whom I met in the street.”

An unusually tender admission of loneliness and its brief lifting · Prose introduction to poems written after the death of his dog

More remarks (31)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. John Keats · −0.1186 − 0.6711i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
  2. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.1341 − 0.6436i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edgar A. Guest · −0.0962 − 0.6704i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  4. Algernon Charles Swinburne · −0.1351 − 0.6358i · 0.028 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · −0.1156 − 0.6213i · 0.029 away · Compare side by side
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